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The Mayor of Munich didn't talk about the feature set available to public employees. He did talk about making "public knowledge accessible in the future". Publ
by Duff 15y ago
The Mayor of Munich didn't talk about the feature set available to public employees.
He did talk about making "public knowledge accessible in the future". Public institutions have a moral and legal obligation to preserve certain items for posterity.
The problem with a proprietary application like iWork is that it uses a closed file format that may or may not stand the test of time. I've worked with archivists in government institutions, and they are already struggling to preserve digital documents produced as late as the 1980s.
As a citizen, I have the ability to learn from the primary sources that are hundreds of years old. One of my college friends spent a semester examining the papers of colonial New York State governors and looking at maps and treaties produced with Indian nations.
Unfortunately, the chances are very high that our children will not be able to read many of the important papers produced from the 1980's through today. How accessible will WordStar documents be in 2060? Or Excel XP spreadsheets in 2100?
There are different approaches to improving the current situation. The State of Washington chose to convert everything from native format to TIFF or PDF images. South Africa and cities like Munich are choosing to mandate the use of free and open native formats. There are ups and downs to each approach.
- pyre 15y agoBut the free market says that the private sector will save us!
- tjr 15y agoIf you throw enough money at the problem, the private sector probably could figure out a way to open ancient WordStar documents. But it'd be so much easier to avoid the problem in the first place...
- jiggy2011 15y agoI'm sure I could given a bit of time write a program to open wordstar documents even without a spec or reference implementation. I imagine the text itself is just stored as ASCII (even if it's not you could just brute force possible encodings until something legible came out). You might not manage to get the formatting 100% but that isn't really any worse than degredation of physical medium. Hell we cracked the german army and naval codes without even really knowing what a computer was.
- kiloaper 15y agoI completely agree. I have documents I wrote in the late 1990s I can no longer open easily. As an example of how quickly technology can change this is a perfect example of digital obsolence (storage medium, not software): https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/BBC_Domesday_...
- webreac 15y agoOpenOffice is far better than recent Microsoft office for opening old Word documents.
- CWuestefeld 15y agoHe did talk about making "public knowledge accessible in the future". Yes, but the conclusion does not follow from this goal. There's no reason that an open format will be readable in the future. If I define some document format, build an application that reads/writes it, and publish it to github with GPL licensing, then in all likelihood it will be forgotten completely in a decade. My inability to gain users will ensure that it withers. On the other hand, even if the .DOC and .XLS files made by Microsoft are proprietary, they've been reverse-engineered and are well-understood; the .DOCX and .XLSX file formats are even documented. Because they're so universally used, out of necessity, someone in the future will be thinking about how to read those old files. So being open might make it more likely that something obscure will be readable in the future. But I don't think it's nearly so strong a likelihood as what demand from an army of users of proprietary software will lead to.
- Duff 15y agoOpen is just part of the equation. ODF is also an international standard: ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 The point is, in the distant future, someone will be able to use the specification for ODF and read a document that complies with the standard. All aspects of the file will be reproducible, including metadata, tables, etc. And as I said, open formats are just one approach. The approach that the US Courts and the State of Washington takes (conversion to PDF/A or TIFF) is a valid approach too.